The NHS at 70 - What will new technology mean to the NHS and its patients?

Researchers from the Health Foundation, Institute for Fiscal Studies, The King’s Fund & the Nuffield Trust have joined forces to produce this report which considers the impact of technology on the NHS -

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/research/the-nhs-at-70-what-will-new-technology-mean-for-the-nhs-and-its-patients

Understanding Patient Data (UPD) has produced a response to the report - http://understandingpatientdata.org.uk/news/future-uses-of-technology

The report states that “ Data can provide new ways for the NHS to learn, improve and generate new research – alongside artificial intelligence (AI), which is providing new analytical capacity for diagnosing patients, effective triage and logistics”.

However, one of the key findings is:

“People generally have relatively little knowledge about how the NHS and commercial organisations use data for health research, which may be responsible for mistrust in some cases. Transparent public dialogue is needed about how data is currently used; what the opportunities are for the future; and how risks can be mitigated. While it is vital to balance the benefits of sharing data with concerns about security and confidentiality, these concerns should not be used as a barrier to progress.”

UPD has highlighted the low support for commercial organisations accessing health data to undertake health research – “It shows a decrease in support compared to a similar survey conducted by Wellcome and Ipsos MORI in 2016. It also found that “relatively few people know much about how commercial organisations use data”. Knowledge of how the NHS uses data was also “fairly poor”.”